By reopening the debate on the EU referendum, Adam Afriyie has achieved the
impossible – a united Conservative Party

The process of historical revisionism, like so much else in the Wi-Fi age, has speeded up dramatically. Once, years, decades or even centuries had to pass before the stone in which the reputation of an individual or event had set could erode and be refashioned. The standard text here is Zhou Enlai’s response when asked about the effects of the French Revolution some 200 years earlier, though it is far too overquoted for even me to trot out yet again (“It is too soon to tell”).

These days, we are less patient than that former Chinese premier, and a few months are generally ample for the reversal of any received wisdom. One indecently perfect example of this is our old friend Adam Afriyie, the dashing Conservative MP for Windsor.

As recently as April, after the public exposure of his alleged plot to oust and replace David Cameronas prime minister, it was universally agreed that this was a conceited and preposterous poseur. While admiring a man who had journeyed from a Peckham council flat to a self-made fortune estimated at £50-£100 million as an emblem of social mobility, the consensus held that a brief stint as shadow science minister was inadequate grounding for a putsch.

When Adam dismissed the charge of cack-handed treachery as “Westminster tittle-tattle”, insisting he was an ultra‑loyalist striving only to unite his party, he was not widely believed. When it then emerged that he had remortgaged the Windsor mansion to which the Family Afriyie repairs each Friday, “when our whole entourage of nannies and helpers transfer” – an oddity for one so wealthy, though none of our beeswax – many assumed he was raising cash to bankroll a leadership challenge.

How foolish we feel today. Six months later, no one can credibly deny that Adam was speaking the God’s honest. Far from being the ambitious schemer of his springtime reputation, he was being sincere when in April he said: “I’m genuinely not ambitious… and never have been. I’m concerned about the Conservative Party, that it’s united and able to win elections.”

Thanks to his decision to table an amendment demanding that the EU referendum, as promised by David Cameron for 2017, be brought forward to October of next year, Adam has achieved the first half of his dream. At least 140 of the 147 Tory MPs elected for the first time in 2010 put their names to an online request that he cease this nonsense and behave, and the word is that previous intakes will do the same if he fails to take the hint. He has united the entire parliamentary party on this lethally schismatising issue to a degree unseen since the Maastricht Treaty.

Observers of Westminster pond life will be wearily familiar with the serially treacherous affecting to be arch loyalists. In Adam, uniquely, we find the precise reverse: a politician of such unflinching loyalty, and so selflessly indifferent to his own interests, that he has deliberately laid down his career to strengthen Mr Cameron.

Now it has to be admitted that there are those who either cannot or will not accept this. Some cling defiantly to the misapprehension that he is an arrogant and unembarrassable fantasist in the Jeffrey Archer mould, closeted in the mystical kingdom of Afriyieland, where the elves and fairies gambol in an eternal rainbow under Adam’s saintly rule.

Others suspect that, without realising it, he is being run by undercover Cameron agents who have infiltrated what we will dignify as his “camp”, encouraging him to cement the PM’s position with a series of wondrously mistimed and misjudged attacks.

If people wish to be obtuse, that is their privilege. The self-evident truth is that no one as dazzlingly clever as Adam, whose Question Time performance on Thursday night may have been the finest since Carol Vorderman’s legendary tour de force, could have failed to understand that his amendment, while magnifique, was not le guerre. Yet like the Light Brigade, although fully aware in advance of the outcome, on and on he charged into the valley of death.

If heroic self-sacrifice and the Westminster politician have never been the lustiest of bedfellows, they have lately made the George & Mildred of giant pandas look like a pair of rutting teenagers. In Adam Afriyie’s active embrace of failure for the salvation of the party he loves, our faith in the archaic notion of politics as a chivalrous endeavour is restored. If his metaphorical middle name is Altruist, this is one triple A that no credit rating agency will ever downgrade.

He is Captain Oates hobbling out of the tent to his icy grave in the hope that his friends might survive to reach base camp. He is Rick Blaine, another paradigm of sheer gallantry disguised as cynical self-interest, forcing Ilsa Lund on to the plane with Victor Laszlo at the end of Casablanca, throwing away his one shot at happiness for the fight against Nazism.

It would be misleading to suggest that, in terms of being a serious player, Adam Afriyie may be gone some time. He was never there in the first place. But a man of such lustrous talents could have been a contender. Instead, he cultivated the false image of a brazen exhibitionist with the political antennae of a Tibetan mountain yak on Ritalin to unite every wing of the Conservative Party, from Kenneth Clarke at one end to Jacob Rees-Mogg at the other, on Europe. If David Cameron has the good grace to reciprocate the loyalty, this could, if only in secret, be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.